Megan Mullally kisses and tells about 'Childrens Hospital'

"I've now made out with every member of the cast, which is hilarious," Megan Mullally told me Wednesday during a phone chat, "including one guy whose name I did not know until after we had shot the scene. ... Didn't know his name. It's pretty much porn."

And this season, we see her character, sex-crazed Chief, as a 1970s candy-striper in flashback scenes. Season 3 of "Childrens Hospital" premieres at 11 p.m. June 2 on Adult Swim. It's worth staying up to watch.

Mullally and I talked more about the season, her hubby, Nick Offerman of "Parks & Recreation," and her time spent in Chicago. [Note from Curt: This interview should have been one of the last post on my old blog. I could not find it today, so I've reposted here for Megan's fans. It's pretty fun.]

Have you been back to Chicago lately?Yeah, we were there at Christmas. It was nice. My in-laws live in Minooka.

Right, and I think when we talked last year you were actually there.Yeah, that’s funny.

And unicorns flew by the window, remember.[Laughs.] That’s right.

Remember that? Nick was looking out the window.That’s right. There might be another one today. It is unicorn season.

So let’s talk “Childrens Hospital” a little bit. We didn’t talk a lot about it last time. Does the chief actually have a name?Well, first of all, her name is Chief and she is never referred to as “the chief,” only Chief because her actual name is Chief because she is 100 percent Choctaw Indian. That will be revealed this season. Yeah, that will be revealed by me in an episode set in the ’70s because the show “Childrens Hospital” has been running since the ’70s and we flashback to an episode from the ’70s and Chief is just a young candy striper.

So what can we expect this season?Oh Lord. [Laughs.] Now it’s to the point where they’re consciously trying not to have any kind of like through line for any of the characters so that if two of the characters are in a romance in one episode they want to be sure that that romance is not continued past one episode. [Laughs.] My character, of course, is irresistible to both sexes apparently, and I've now made out with like every member of the cast, which is hilarious…

Rob actually asked me last night because we’re going to have a roundtable to discuss ideas for episodes for the next season, which is just coming up. We usually shoot around Christmastime and they’re going to start writing soon and he actually specifically asked me to think of ideas that were free-standing episodes. He doesn’t want any season arcs or character arcs, anything like that. He wants each episode to be completely it’s own private Idaho.

That’s nice; you guys get to come up with your own storylines.Well yeah, they do that. They have roundtables with some writer friends of theirs and then some cast members and people pitch ideas for the show and for their characters and they end up really using quite a lot of those.

I remember one time Rob told me that—I loved the way he described the show. He said that it’s a show about sexy doctors who like to bone each other at the workplace. [Read "Rob Corddry promises 'tons of nudity'...][Laughs.] Well, you could authentically use that exact same description to describe, say, “Grey’s Anatomy” or some other real shows.

Right, he also said those kind of shows sort of jump the shark in the very first episode, so it’s kind of like you can’t even…You can’t really even top that. Nick and I accidentally caught an episode of one of those shows. I guess I won’t say which one, but we caught an episode of one of those primetime shows that are big hits by accident when we were on vacation. It was literally like four times crazier than any episode of “Childrens Hospital” has ever been. We couldn’t believe it.

You don’t usually watch those shows, right?No, I don’t. Well I don’t; no, I don’t. They don’t appeal to me for some reason. I used to watch “ER” a little bit when it was at its kind of apex. I thought it was great, but I don’t know.

You’re doing all this crazy stuff, but then you realized your stuff isn’t even close to that.No, it’s not even close. Ours is like the drama and the other ones are the comedies.

Speaking of “ER,” I just talked to Noah Wyle. He is in town promoting his new series and we talked a little bit about “ER.”That’s funny. We talked about this last time, I went to college with Laura Innes, who Chief was originally like very loosely based on. In the web series Chief was on crutches rather than a walker, and so I'm friends with Laura and I called her up before we did the web series and I was like, “OK, I got these scripts for this thing, it’s really funny, do you care?” She was like, “Oh my God, no, it sounds hilarious!”

She has subsequently seen the show and thinks it’s really funny. Now it has just gone way beyond her character from “ER” now.

Now she has like the walker and…Walker and a hunchback.

And the mole.The mole, the traveling mole, no makeup. I’m wearing a man’s wig from Hollywood Boulevard, no makeup. I wear these crazy dresses that they get from costume houses that are from the ’80s. It has like big shoulder pads and they’re just horrible all the way around, like dirndl skirts.

So how are you making her ever grosser this season? It’s hard to believe.I know! I just heard, I was so mad because they’re doing that “SUV” show or whatever. I can’t remember the name of it, but they’re doing another show for Adult Swim that John Stern is producing and they cast Kate Mulgrew in this character and John Stern told me last night that she has an eye patch and she smokes a pipe and I was like, “Balls, I would have liked an eye patch and a pipe.” I have to wrestle Kate Mulgrew before she gets to be grosser.

You’ll just have to top that one. What can we come up with for that?I know. I know. Well we did discuss my character having an eye patch at one point, but.

How about a chin beard?In the candy striper episode I'm wearing like a kind of a body brace that goes around my midsection and then in one quick flashback I'm wearing a giant neck brace from some other era because apparently like through the years of “Childrens Hospital,” Chief’s diseases have progressed or changed or morphed or I don’t know what. But yeah, I've got to think of something more. It can be a clubfoot … She has a series of horrible, debilitating degenerative diseases. She’s just got everything.

You name it and she has it. How long does it take you to shoot a season?We shoot an episode every two days, so we shoot like two-and-a-half episodes a week and so we shoot for 7 weeks, 14 episodes.

And is it just sort of nonstop craziness?Yeah, it’s pretty hairy, but it’s fun. I mean it’s so absurdist that I mean you can literally do anything and it will be fine. It’s like you can’t go too far, although there have been times where—I remember we were in our hair and makeup room and Rob Huebel pitched to Rob Corddry that in this ’70s flashback episode his character is Hispanic and Rob was like, “No, no, that’s too much.” But I don’t see why it would be really. Like he could have been Hispanic originally and then suddenly wasn’t.

Do you have anything I guess to say to the people who might be outraged by the jokes?Yeah, no, I don’t know. All I can say is, “I feel you.” My mom is elderly and she’s not doing too well and I’ve literally never told her about “Childrens Hospital,” because I fear that if she ever sees it, it will be like the coup de grace. I know what people are saying, but that’s comedy. I mean you have to keep pushing the envelope, as the expression goes.

And that’s the crazy thing. We’re on Adult Swim at midnight so we can do it. We can’t say dirty words, but when we actually do go so far beyond saying a four-letter word. The whole standards and practices thing is so funny to me because what we’re doing is so much worse than just saying the F word.

Have you had anything like that you were supposed to do that you went whoa? Oh my God. It’s like every episode I’m like, “OK, here we go.” [Laughs.]

Do you just say this is going to be funny, but wow, this could take a lot for me to do?The only thing that I've had to do that I was like, “You guys,” was an episode with the character of Chet, who is like a secondary character who is the ambulance driver. He is madly in love with Chief and he comes up to ask me a question and I'm eating a big like sloppy Joe or something and I’ve got like food all over my face, but he still just thinks I'm an angel.

That, for some weird reason of all the crazy things that we’ve done, that was the one thing where I was like, “You guys, I look so gross!” because I look disgusting all the time, but for some reason having food on my face just like sent me over the edge.

Was it just because you didn’t want to be seen with the food on your face?I thought the idea that was funny that she should look as disgusting as possible and he still thinks she is a princess, but I don’t know. For some reason, just personally, being there and having mayonnaise dripping down my chin just completely grossed me out. I mean it’s funny because everything Chief does is disgusting. I don’t know why that would be the one thing that would bother me.

That kind of reminds me of a prom story one time where a friend of mine’s girlfriend threw up and then he immediately went to make out with her.[Laughs.] That happened to me. That exact thing happened to me. I had been madly in love with this loser guy. I was a junior and he was a sophomore and he finally asked me to a dance and he got completely wasted before we even got to the dance and we had to sit in the backseat of somebody’s Volkswagen Bug for the whole dance and he was passed out and he woke up and barfed and then wanted to make out and I literally had spent a year like sort of like winking and flirting trying to get this guy’s attention.

And that is what you end up with. Now see, there is an idea for a next season.Yeah, totally, that’ll fit right in.

Are you working on other things?I'm just pitching shows. It has been going kind of well just pitching things out of the box and then I'm going to form a production company, but I haven’t done it yet. I'm just like independently doing stuff and I'm going back on “Parks & Rec” for a couple episodes and “Childrens Hospital” and I don’t know. I get offered stuff that I don’t really want to do, so hopefully. I'm just kind of waiting for the right thing.

Any chance that we might see you in “Smash” with Deborah?I haven’t heard anything. No, but I've heard that “Smash” is great.

I just kind of want to see you singing or hear you singing.Yeah, I would like to do something like that for sure.

Maybe you should come back to Chicago for something.Yeah.

Onstage.I love Chicago, absolutely, love Chicago. I mean I’d much rather go to Chicago and do a play or a musical than New York, honestly. Because just probably for reasons that are obvious to you. It’s just a little bit—it’s a nicer, easier city.

I hear that you film in the hospital where they shot “Scrubs” and I hear it’s kind of disgusting there.Oh my God. Words cannot describe. It is the gnarliest, most disease ridden, disgusting place. There have been times when I’m going up and down this stairwell and it will trigger my gag reflex. There is just like people’s old like crazy boogers and dandruff and whatever else piled up in the corners. It’s so bad. Yeah, the dressing rooms were like you couldn’t take your shoes off, so we would have to like kind of like jump into our costume shoes from our street shoes. It was so crazy. We shoot around Christmastime, so I got cheap new carpeting for all the girl’s dressing rooms. The guys don’t care—the dirtier the better for them, but the girls were just having a hard time.You fixed it up for them.

Yeah, we got some samples. It was super cheap carpeting and we all picked this zebra striped carpeting. It’s pretty bad, but it was fun. It made it nice. The building is condemned, by the way. They have been threatening to tear it down for like four years, but they just keep stalling.

And you guys spend seven weeks in it every Christmastime.Yeah. It’s like being inside of like a nuclear reactor for seven weeks.

Does it get you in your mindset for the show though?Yeah, the weird thing is, over the couple of seasons that we’ve been shooting there … I realized suddenly one day that I was starting to think, “You know, this isn’t that bad. It’s kind of nice.” [Laughs.] I thought uh-oh. You can get used to anything. [Laughs.] It was starting to seem pretty nice, but I think because it’s in imbued. It’s horrible, but because it’s in imbued with happy memories and fun people yeah.

But you trick yourself into just believing it. So has Nick shaved yet?Nick has a full beard. He is like Grizzly Adams.

I saw the Budweiser thing he’s doing. Do you like the beard?I do. I like him with the beard. I like all of his various facial hair configurations. When we first met he had a mustache and a completely bald, shaved head. We were doing a play together and that was what the character had, so I've seen every configuration of hair on him. I've seen him with a white Mohawk that wrapped around over his ears and then under like a chinstrap beard. It was dyed completely white. I had to have sex with that, so I've been through it all. I've been through the trenches.

Well thanks for your time. It looks like it’s going to be a fun, gross season again.I think it’s going to be the best yet. I've only seen a couple of episodes, but I know what we shot. The thing is each episode is so high concept; I think that’s what makes it really fun because they really take so many risks and it’s very ambitious in that sense and I think that is what is great about it. They’re creative. I think the whole group is just a really creative group.